


Fare Forward, Voyagers

by landofspices



Category: Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Episode Related, Gen, Guy-centric, Missing Scene, Roman Catholicism, Seasickness, Sexual Abuse, Stockholm Syndrome, Travel, Unrequited Guy/Marian, poor Gisborne siblings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 08:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7353850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/landofspices/pseuds/landofspices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guy of Gisborne took four sea voyages between England and the Holy Land: these are their stories. </p><p>N.B. No Robin/Marian yet. Chapter 3 will have Marian in, and it's canon compliant so she'll be pretty sad. </p><p>[tw: alludes to the abusive relationship between Vaisey and Guy, including fleeting references to sexual abuse.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fare Forward, Voyagers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Eugeal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eugeal/gifts).



> I won't leave this author's note up long-term as it will soon become out-of-date as I get back to normal, but: long time, no see! I haven't abandoned any of my WIPs. ;) Sorry for the long delay in updates after initially being so prolific; I've been going through lots of weird shit irl (...country lost its mind and ruined its own economy; got a new v big medical diagnosis + went to my friend's funeral following an especially difficult set of circumstances surrounding the death). So, just no time at all for writing in the middle of that, but I do plan to update the WIPs again. Glad that I'm finally writing this, as I've wanted to/had it in mind for ages.

_Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony_  
_(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,_  
_Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,_  
_Is not in question) are likewise permanent_  
_With such permanence as time has._

— T. S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages"

 

It’s craven and he knows it, but Guy wishes Vaisey’s lie had come to pass. In the poets’ lays, falsehoods turn to truths. He holds his head up, to look like a knight, and a gust of wind whips his hair about. The horse’s sides ripple between his legs, warm and familiar, but the sky above hangs down like a sodden grey fleece: there’s no rain yet, but the clouds are heavy. If I lay sick a-bed at Locksley, he thinks — only it’s no good. If you haven’t any ague, the flesh won’t let you remember what one is like. If I lay shrouded in blankets, swallowing physic. He doesn’t want to die of such a malady: he doesn’t want to die at all. The prospect of the journey yawns before him like a hellmouth. Come ye in. Come ye in. The air touches his face coldly.

Nearly seven years, he’s been back in England. My feet on the green ways again. The meadow grasses crushed under my boots. He looks down at the horse’s dark mane, breeze-ruffled, straying. I hadn’t one-and-twenty summers, he thinks, biting his lip. When he brought me back.

On the ship from France, he heard the waves rush and break. They struck softly and swiftly, softly and swiftly: a sea-torn music sang from the ship’s curved side. He lay in the close heat of the cabin and was usually alone. Vaisey left him there. It was not distaste for weakness, for by then he knew that Guy was weak, nor disgust at Guy’s feeble stomach. In France, Guy was purposely made drunk on a strong wine, sometimes many nights in succession. Vaisey has long found it tedious and given up the practice, but he has certainly seen Guy pass through every debasement that drunkenness affords. It might have been a suspicion of some sentiment in Guy so infantile as hardly to be worth reproof. That, perhaps, kept him from the cabin, where it is true that an immeasurable grief blossomed in Guy as he lay there, too sick to lift his head, Vaisey’s servant reluctantly tending him. Tears came to his eyes, but he was too wrung with sickness to weep. There was a desolate peace in the cabin, rank and hot as it was. He listened to the waves and thought the sound of them was like the sound of flames taking a wooden manor, and grinding it to ashes. I want to go home, to go home, he thought. More home than this. The servant took a cloth and wiped his mouth, his chin.

The men are not in good order, and if they want to go to a Portsmouth inn, he can’t stop them. His hands tighten on the reins at the thought of it. After all, it’s cold, can he blame them. Yet he does blame them. Is it better to say nothing so that they will not be obliged to defy him? See how he trusts me: these are the words he repeats to himself. I have been chosen, because he knows I will not betray him. To think of hiding away at Locksley, like a sickly, fearful boy —

He swallows and glances back at them. All Vaisey’s guards, for there was no excuse to take Guy’s men from Locksley with their master ailing. Vaisey laughed about it in the last weeks: it’s been one of his jests, since they came to Nottingham. Guy, he pretends, is lonely at Locksley, and takes them into his bed, turn and turn about. You’ll miss them terribly, he said. Won’t you, Guy? He was smiling, stroking Guy’s throat. A hole — a hole in your life! He giggled; his hands tightened. If you go looking for a Saracen prick to fill it, Guy, I’ll string you up in the courtyard before all of Nottingham. And won’t they like it? Guy flinched: he could scarcely argue with that. A kiss fell on his hot cheek and Vaisey said: good boy.

It would be no easier with his own guards. Their favoured jests concern his landlessness. They echo his own thoughts, which come sometimes in his father’s voice, sometimes his mother’s. Why, still not an acre to your name. Not a very barn, Guy. It is the mere truth, and it ought not to fire his face as the speculations of Vaisey’s men do, they who take such pleasure in surmising what they think he does — and how often, for how long, and in what positions — as a catamite. Yet he is as humiliated by the naked Gisborne name as he is by their knowledge of his sin. It should not be so, for one is, after all, the stuff of the world, and he will lay it aside in time as he passes out of this life. The stains of the other he will take into death itself.

He tells himself: look at me now. I am to go away alone, out of the country no less. He trusts me, and he’s right to. For I will not betray him. Look at me, now, with it all before me.

*

We didn’t come this way, Guy tells himself. Don’t think of it. It’s Portsmouth, Portsmouth, and the ship will be ready. The salt taste that creeps into every breath he takes has made him a boy again. He feels frightened, sitting up sharply on his horse. Keep that head up. It’s not the same town, or the same ship, and Isabella is not here. We had no horses, did we? Of course not, we hadn’t anything.

He gives no order to the men. In the Holy Land, it will be different. They won’t be looking around every corner for an inn; there’ll be only our task, to be done and finished. Let the poor bastards drink till the tide turns if they must. And yet he knows it is not generosity that keeps him from telling them to board at once. It is not kindness.

It takes Guy a long time to find the ship, pushing his way on the crowded and noisy landing stages. When he does, though, he is welcomed: the Captain, a ruddy, gentle-voiced man named Courtenay, agrees to show him over it, and does so in a cold drizzle which grows heavier by degrees. Guy feels his hair grow wet and limp, but he says nothing. They will soon, after all, be at sea, and to complain of the weather now would surely mark him as a soft nobleman, a creature of no mettle.

Courtenay asks no questions about the whereabouts of the men. There’s still no sign of them.

One of sailors has carried Guy’s baggage into his cabin, but beyond that he has not touched it. The valise sits there, full of things for the journey. Are they testing him, to see if he’ll command them to see to his things? It is easy at Locksley, where he’s nearly as good as the lord: as sainted Robin, long gone to the Holy Land. He wonders for a moment if he might see him, and he has to swallow a lump of fear in his throat. No, he couldn’t bear that. Robin has gone away, perhaps for good. Guy can give an order at Locksley, he can see it done. Thornton will never say him nay. There’s an innocence about it, like being a child again. Now he feels much more afraid than Vaisey would think acceptable. His gullet is tight, full of a sharpness he cannot name. He does not know what he ought to do. If it's not a test, and they laugh at him and say they will not serve him, what happens next? There is no Sheriff. If he tells Courtenay to flog a man for insolence, will he do it? Or will he stop patiently telling Guy the names of seafaring things, ship things, things Guy doesn’t understand, and be altogether different.

He’s had nearly seven years. It’s not enough to close up the wound in him. He can hear them now, coming back at last: the men who are called his, straggling aboard in a gay clamour. First some of the younger ones, shouting of whores. Oh, it’s not cheap. The Nottingham drabs lift their skirts for the sniff of silver, that’s enough. But here, well: it’s exotic. Can’t say fairer. Give me a little quean to fill my lap, man. Give me a one, to dandle.

Isabella’s hand trembled in his, and her back was pressed to his breast. Their ribs knocked. The streets were busy: you couldn’t move fast. He’d realised long ago they no longer bore much sign of their birth. A little peasant girl can have fine eyes too, set in the hollows of her unfed face. A woman caught Isabella’s elbow and wrenched her away from him. Put in with a sooty finger, she said, tracing the edges of his sister’s eyes with her fingernail. Isabella caught him with her gaze. She seemed to say, are we come to this?

*

Guy ate sparingly in the morning, but after the tide takes them, once they are out at sea, he has no respite from sickness. They all stand on the deck at first and watch the water stretch out into a strip of silk, gracing the distance between ship and shore with a grey brightness that becomes touched with dark silver as they draw further and further away. He tries to remember all the lessons Vaisey gave him: to school his face, and betray nothing that can be called weakness. The terror of leaving England again is something he has never spoken aloud, but he knows that it is known. We have no secrets, Vaisey said, and his voice was soft. Guy, you know that.

Once they are out in the tossing Channel waters, he loses mastery of himself. After some time, Courtenay finds him on the deck. At first he thinks that the captain is angry. He protests that Guy should have said something about being so much affected, and then he shouts. Guy cannot help shrinking away, which is by no means fitting. You cannot cringe like a lapdog, when you are a knight, Gisborne: though it may be your nature. The captain, it turns out, is only calling for two sailors to come and assist Sir Guy to his cabin.

At first it’s a relief to be lying down. He cannot remove his boots or his clothes: he is only still, still as the dead. When the sense of doubt, then churning dread, crawls through his belly again, and saliva trickles into his mouth impendingly, it takes all his strength to snatch at the washing bowl and curl over it in time.

It goes on for hours, and then days. He sleeps sometimes, passages of sticky blackness fraught with dreams. Courtenay’s servant attends to him: he is one of the sailors, Guy learns, but he does some serving-man duties too. None of the guards come near, and he wonders if many of them are ill too. It cannot, surely, be his affliction alone? He’s afraid to ask Paul, the sailor and servant, in case the answer comes back: yes, my lord, it is. The man has a very brown, wrinkled face, and old-looking hands, but he is strong. He washes Guy’s face, changes his shift and washes out his linens — even feeds him on an unfamiliar, strange-tasting drink, which is meant to help, but doesn’t. Nothing does, and Guy begins to pray silently, in case he is dying. Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. The words, though he knows them so well, often twist in his sore mouth. He wants to say them soundlessly, to let nobody know that he’s afraid. His world has shrunk to the four wooden walls of the cabin. Sometimes he thinks it is like a coffin, floating aimlessly across the seven seas. But he has heard tell they have no coffins, at sea.

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei. He turns onto his side and pushes his face into the blanket. Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. He has discovered this way of weeping, when he cannot refrain from it: the tears soak into wool, and no one is the wiser. Guy is always afraid that Courtenay will come in and discover him with blocked nose and wet eyes: he cannot think I am any good, can he, to be the man in charge of them? He does not come to me with matters of indiscipline; I’m not sure, in truth, why he comes at all.

Mother of God, Mother of God. He lies awake, and Paul has told him it is night, time to sleep, but he feels stripped to the innards. They have drawn my belly out with a hook. There is nothing left. He knows, as he thinks it, that it is a blasphemy, but he burns with a cold, stony envy for the Christ who hung, crucified, with his mother weeping below. To feel pain like this, motherless. To step, motherless, into the shadow of death; to let them wrap you in a thin shroud and cast your body into the sea; to sink beneath the waves, motherless. To go unwatched, unmourned. “Pray for us,” he whispers. Caught between the task before him, the man behind him, and the sea beneath him, Guy cannot say any more. No prayer has ever been listened to. If his mother would come in, to wipe his mouth and eyes, to say the words with him again in her old fashion —

That was her way, to teach them their devotions. Do not lie down to sleep, angry with God, she said. Make your peace with Him. When the veils of sleep are on your eyes, He does not forget you.

The blessing of sleep does not come, and he hears only the watery sounds of the sea: they are as strange as death, and he wants to pray again, but he can’t.

*


End file.
